


this is how we meet, my dear

by flappergirlsfolly



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Mild Language, Non-Linear Narrative, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 11:14:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2579528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flappergirlsfolly/pseuds/flappergirlsfolly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>prompt fill. </p><p>jon and ygritte meet for the first time in several oddly exquisite ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is how we meet, my dear

**Author's Note:**

> prompt fill for this post: http://proudofus.tk/post/100014676794/oddly-specific-aus-i-need

“OH MY GOD.”

He looked up from his phone at the exclamation but figured, you know, hey, it’s college and the girl who just screeched in her room probably tripped over a Frisbee that was smoking pot and landed on a couple of red solo cups.

Returning to his phone (Pyp and Grenn posted a selfie from the lobby of a casino- they had a _class_ tomorrow morning) and Robb was off somewhere with Theon and the Jeynes and Arya was back home in Winterfell. So he was probably headed to Starbucks, which was open until midnight. Sam and Gilly would be done by midnight, right?

There was a moment of muffled shouting from the room with the shouting lady, before the door crashed open and some batty redhead crashed into him.

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HALLWAY FOR-“ Jon blinked. She was really short. Like, shorter than him, and having inherited his father’s height, that was _saying_ something. And cross? Well, yes, she was shouting at him like some angry picket liner. Wow. Um. “-POTENTION HAZARD, LIKE WHAT THE HELL, MAN, ARE YOU TOTALLY- are you even sentient?”

To prove her point, she waved her hand in front of his face, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her palms and smell the spearmint toothpaste- why did her hands smell like toothpaste?- and near enough that he flinched.

“Uh,” he said intelligently.

“Oh, you know nothing Nigel Whatshisname.”

“Nig-Nigel Whats-“

“Well I don’t know your bloody name, do I?”

“Jon Snow.”

“What?”

“My name.”

“Oh. Ygritte.”

She dropped her hands to her hips, her backpack gaping open.

“Hey! Harry Potter?”

“What about it?” she snapped, glancing down at the book in her bag, and back at him as she zipped it up.

“Er, nothing. I mean, I like that book. Those books. And films- well the books.” She grunted in response, and tossed the straps over her shoulders.

“Yeah, and I do too. Hell, I might even want to discuss them with you- like the Tonks and Remus representation, but right now I think all I can see in my _visuo-spatial sketchpad_ \- you know, except for my psych test- is my roommate’s boyfriend’s arse in the air like the fucking down facing dog. How do they even get that damn far in the ten minutes it takes me to brush my teeth and take a piss-“

“No way!” he exclaimed, and she blinked, affronted.

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh, just, um. That’s why I’m out here. Sam- my roommate. And his girlfriend. Felt like I needed to let him, I mean, he never-“

“Well I suppose we need to go and get some coffee then!” she shouted, throwing her hands in the air and turning away from him, stomping down the hall.

“What?”

“Come on, Jon Snow.”

With a baffled curiosity, he followed her.

* * *

 

“We’re literally the only two kids on this school bus, we should carpool and make out.”

“Oh! Um…”

“You’re gay?”

“No.”

“Okay then…?”

“I live, like, two routs away.”

“Then why… oh.”

…

“So… carpool and make out?”

* * *

 

“Holy shit, I’m in the wrong car!”

“You don’t say.” She agreed drily, looking up from the backpack jammed between her knees that she was rooting through.

“Goddamnit, it looks just like mine!” the obscenely cute guy carried on, red to the roots of his curly hair as he gestured madly that she start driving.

Shrugging, she turned the key and waited for the car to churn to life.

“Hope yours doesn’t make that sound.”

“Right down to the colour, I mean what a crazy coincidence-“

His speech was cut off as he wedged him down beside the door, away from the window with a look of abject terror on his face.

“Everything okay there, Biggles?”

“Yeah. Sorry to, um, you know. This. Do you suppose you could give me a lift to the station?”

“Wow. How far are you running away- and from whom?”

“The comic book store, it’s near the station. My stepmother’s here, doting on my brother.”

“The comic book store?”

She felt his panicked gaze flit to her, and the panic in his dawning realization.

“I mean the gym.” He amended gruffly. She looked at him for a long moment, her will to not laugh exploding in her face (or painfully in her nose, to be precise).

She ignored his glaring as she laughed, and took the turn off before the station.

“You missed the-“

“Not the turn off for the bar, love.”

* * *

 

“Remind me how you still listen to these.”

“I put the CD in the drawer and press the button. I don’t need some magic rectangle to play my music for me, Jon Snow.”

“A magic rectangle?”

“Well I bet it is magic. Tell me, does it scratch your balls for you, as well?”

“It’s call an iPod, and no it does not you disgusting heathen.”

“Oh my, you’re losing your innocence, ain’tcha?”

She pinched his darkening cheek, with a grin, as he dropped her cardboard carton of CDs on the desk and glared in resign.

“My face is bright red, isn’t it?”

She laughed in response as he rolled his eyes and loaded a CD into her laptop.

“So tell me how I’m supposed to listen to these?”

“On _the magic rectangle_ Robb and Sansa are getting you for Christmas.”

“Hey, hey, hey! Spoiler alert- hey, why the siblings of my cute mate buying me an expensive gift and not you, sweet cheeks?”

“They like you!”

“And what about you? Do you like me?”

He coloured again, and mumbled something incoherent.

Rolling her eyes, she reached over him and plucked a CD from the box.

“I love this one- oh for God’s sake!”

Pulling her bra-less torso away from his face, she whirled his desk chair around so he was facing her, and placed her hands either side of his face.

“You’ve got a little thing you do, you know. When you like something- you still look like you’re made out of stone, but you do the tiniest bit of a lip thing, like you’re trying not to laugh.”

(He just looked a bit perturbed and very scared, but she went ahead anyway)

“So I kind of know if you’re telling a lie.”

She leaned forward and kissed his nose.

“Lip thing.” She teased, kissing his eyebrow. “Lip thing.” She repeated.

She reached for the hem of her vest, and he did the lip thing, but totally nearly hyperventilated.

“Maybe one thing at a time?” he choked, and she grinned with a wink.

“Sure. Oh, Sex on Fire’s done loading.”

Jon groaned, and she couldn’t help but giggle again.

* * *

 

“Jon, maybe you should calm it down a few fucks.”

“No, Arya, this is madness!”

“I get why you’re pissed, but it’s a theme park, shit happens.”

“It presents a potential hazard. What if it had gotten jammed in some of the machinery and the forty people had been stuck upside down for got knows how long?”

“Why is my brother such an old man?” Bran groaned.

“Hey! It’s not me that’s the problem here, it’s hippies wearing inappropriate footwear on rollercoasters.”

Realising, that at that moment he was brandishing the offensive sandal at his wheelchair-bound brother while shouting about hippies, he stopped for a moment.

“Okay, but that’s not the point, I’m just saying that-“

“HEY!”

Charging through the crowd was a woman in a long sweeping sundress, messy trailing red hair and such fine pale skin that it seemed to glow in the afternoon sunlight, right down to her-

-single shoeless foot.

“What in the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Me? You’re the one throwing kamikaze shoes all over the place!”

“It’s not my fault- the rollercoaster was upside down, in case you didn’t notice!”

“I was too busy being hit in the face with your shoe!”

“Well, you’re a bloke. You can’t multitask.”

“Of course I’m a bloke! You want to talk about fulfilling stereotypes? You’re a woman and you can’t even control your shoes!”

Her mouth dropped open, and she took a step back.

“I’m sorry? You fucking well know I’m a woman because I saw you having a nice ol’ perv before-“

“Don’t turn this on me, you’re the one who bought gender into it-“

His speech was cut off as he was caught in a chokehold.

“ARYA WHAT THE HELL?”

She kicked him in the back of the knee (easily accessible from where she hung like a limpet on his back).

“I thought I’d stop you before you said something you’d regret- like, more than this.”

“Well thank you. Your brother clearly can’t function without someone to crack the whip.”

“Yeah, well, our other sister clearly reckons that should be you, hence the strangling.”

Jon whipped around (as fast as he could, without jostling Arya around too much) to see Sansa standing behind Bran’s chair, beside Robb and Rickon with the same grin on her face that she’d worn the first time she watched _When Harry Met Sally_.

“Oh, shit.” He muttered suddenly deflated of his anger.

Sighing, he passed her sandal back to the madwoman in silence, and watched in awe as she somehow managed to hop into her shoe without breaking her judgmental stare, and reach forward to whip his phone out of his front pocket.

“Um,” he yelped, leaping back a few feet from sheer terror.

“You’re cute enough, I guess- but stupid. Who doesn’t have a passcode? Oh well, Dumb but Pretty, here y’are.”

She tossed his phone back to him and flounced past them without a word.

(He was so caught up watching her leave in his befuddled state of attraction that he didn’t even notice Arya tearing the phone from his grasp until she was already running in the other direction)

_‘Dinner, tomorrow night, surprise me with location. Will wear suitably attached footwear. Don’t walk into a pole or something on the way there, Dumb but Pretty.’_

* * *

 

The deliciously warm water eddied around her chest, the heated current barrelling lazily into her body. Slicing through the water, she reached the edge of the concrete sea bath, and leaned against it in a languid stupor.

“Excuse me?”

She glanced over at a perfectly bright red face, standing beside her as though he half expected her to start laughing at him for no good reason.

“Hm?”

“I, uh, don’t mean to be intrusive ma’am but-“

“Did you just call me ma’am?” she asked at the same he explained in a flurry of heatedly mortified syllables “-my swim trunks came off when I jumped in the water and you’re kind of standing on them.”

Right. Not expecting that.

There was an awkward pause, in which he redness of face increased so intensely that for a moment she thought he might boil over.

“ _Did_ you call me ma’am?”

“Well- I- yes- I’m being polite!”

“No you’re not. You’re shouting at me. You’re allegedly naked and you’re shouting at me.”

“I’m not allegedly naked, I am naked, and you’re _standing on my swimming trunks!_ ”

She snorted a laugh and ducked her head under the water.

“You are naked!” she cackled, when she came up for air. He shot his other hand down beneath the water to join the one preserving his modesty, eyes widening in horror.

“Can you just- just- just?” he managed to splutter. “There’s an old lady over there and I think she wants my soul.”

“I think she wants the dick, more like.” She replied, glancing to where the elderly woman sat, failing to hide her pleased grin behind large sunglasses. When he responded with only wide, imploring eyes, she relented.

“Bet you’re a dog person. You look like one. A dog that is.”

She dove beneath the surface of the water and collected his trunks, manoeuvring herself around him, and resurfaced directly behind him.

Silently, she draped the shorts over his head, feeling him cringe in embarrassment.

“There y’are, lover boy. See you round.”

* * *

 

 _Snore_.

He would have leaped about a foot in the air, had her head shoulder not been deadweight on his shoulder.

 _Snore_.

“Er, hello?” he asked, pressing a finger between the pages of his book.

She didn’t move, but instead burrowed further into his shoulder. Her thin face was as pale as the hands protruding from her jacket sleeves, tiny little lines around her mouth suggesting that she laughed often. She looked like a wide smile would suit her. Luminous hair, like a smudged thumbprint of fire sprawled across his coat, snagging on woollen fibres and plastering a good portion of his chest in a hazy amber glow.

Carefully, so not to wake herm he extricated his phone from his trouser pocket and typed a clumsy left hand message to Robb.

_‘Sorry, can you tell your Mum I’m going to be late.’_

**_Snore_**.

Her mouth pressed open and she began to drool on his shoulder.

“Eh.”He muttered, with a slight shrug.

* * *

 

The window clattered open behind him with such force that he jumped about a foot in the air. 

“Goddamnit!” The girl in the flat next door to him shouted, hurling herself out of the window with a ferocity that suggested she hadn’t actually just rolled out of bed. (Her oversized and sleep-rumpled Kansas City Trucker Run 2009 t-shirt said otherwise) “Not cute neighbour guy!” 

“What?” he shouted, over the whirring of the lawnmower. 

“So you’re the douchebag who keeps mowing the lawn while I’m trying to sleep!” 

He leaned down and tugged the wire pull cord, shutting of the screeching engine. 

“Why are you trying to sleep at midday?” 

“Because I work a late shift! And now I find out that the penis wrinkle who keeps letting this little son of a bitch scream through my sleep is the hot one!” 

In sheer anger, she lashed out at the mower, kicking it with a socked foot. It made him quite aware that she had literally just slid out of bed and onto the lawn, and was now fuming on it in her pyjamas. 

“Right… well, do you want me to do this in the afternoons?” 

“Yes!” 

“Well I’m cutting your grass too- which you never do, by the way.” 

“That’s because you’re always here at some ungodly hour-“ 

“-twelve o’clock in the afternoon-“ 

“-letting this little engine of sadness and death wail like a fucking banshee!” 

“Well why don’t we go to dinner some time and discuss a more suitable hour?” 

He wasn’t sure what made him say it- or what possessed him to use those weird murdery words- but she stopped short, and the overwhelming sense of pre-embarrassment horror descended on him. 

“Fine. But I tell you, if this thing wakes me up one more time-“ 

“What did you say?” 

She raised her eyebrows at him, and he snapped his jaw shut. 

“If this wakes me up one more time, you can use it again after they take it out of your colon.” 

“No, before the death threat?” 

“I said fine. I’ll go to dinner with you.” 

Sharply, she marched back to her window in her t-shirt and socks and shot him a smiling glare. 

“Idiot.”


End file.
